


Apple Sweet

by ConstanceComment



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Blood and Gore, Character Death, Gen, General Badwrong, Greaserstuck, Humanstuck, Implied Relationships, Japanese-American Character, Organized Crime, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, Period-Typical Racism, Prostitution, Shitty Japanese, The Fifties
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-28
Updated: 2013-03-28
Packaged: 2017-12-06 19:36:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/739341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old. Yes, you are old. Young enough to sell, but too old for anything else. There are miles in your soul between here and California; you would need more than three languages to count them all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apple Sweet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rainbowodyssey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowodyssey/gifts).



English is wrong on your lips. Wrong on your parents’ lips, too, but the pun can stand alone.

You hate the sound of it, the way it makes hard things that should have remained soft, the way it slurs things that should have remained discrete. You know the language well enough despite yourself; how could you not? But you refuse to speak it. Pretending ignorance is more than enough to stop others from demanding it of you; they look at your round face and your lush lips, the smile you have for your customers, given up through long lashes around eyes they would call almond- they look at you and they see ignorance and exoticism. They care not that you were born in Los Angeles, raised in Manzanar, the apple orchard. California was home to you before anywhere else. You grew and were fed on English, Japanese, Spanish. Of course you know their language; it has rung harshly in your ears for the entirety of your life. But that language does not know you, save for words like “whore” and “Jap” and “Chink” even though you are not Chinese.

Mituna learned to speak English at the camps. He forgot his Japanese very quickly once you had left; it was his method of surviving, there and elsewhere. To live in the cold at Manzanar your brother grew his hair long over his eyes and spoke the language of his oppressors. Only once you left, the habits refused to die away and instead they took a part of your family.

Mituna used to smile like the sun before they shot him down, bullet casings ringing like bells on the concrete floor of that warehouse on the edge of town. He had stayed behind to buy time, to give the rest of the gang time to escape. You used to call them family, that gang, and Mituna died for them accordingly. Sollux and Aradia had slipped out the back with Tavros, Vriska and Terezi. You had ushered them out the door before turning back to your first brother, just in time to watch them cut him down like the beans they used to grow at Manzanar. The gunshots were too loud in that room, bouncing off the walls as thunder trapped inside a tin can, deafening the sound of your heartbeat, muting the small cry you saw spill from your brother’s lips: 仕方がない.

His blood was pooling on the floor when you ran to him. You bit the officer who first tried to pull you from his side, your teeth sinking deep into the meat of his pale hand as it moved to wrench your shoulder. You were beaten for your insolence, but you did not care. Let them think that they could somehow be harsher now than they were in wartime. You were not afraid of their justice anymore, of their laws. Let them dictate what the wished. Your law was inside you, and it was nothing.

Outside, your family was ruined anyway. Tavros was crippled running through the field behind the warehouse, the younger Serket girl tripping over him with an eye shot out when they were hunted down. Terezi was blinded by the light and the small bits of shrapnel from her own mother’s flash grenade. Sollux was caught and had his teeth knocked in when he cursed his arresting officers. Aradia only cursed louder and more in English after what they did to Sollux and as such was beaten about the head until she could no longer speak at all, in English or in Japanese, her mouth sealed shut with bruises and blood.

Things drifted, after that. Your family was hauled in to prison; your parents came to rescue you. You know now that your safety was bought in blood and sex from the English family, but at the time you only remembered the anger. The rage of losing Mituna was a living thing in your body when you were brought to the morgue to identify his corpse. Now you can recognize the irony; English set you free and with that freedom bought the souls of your parents, same as the Christian devil they preached in Manzanar. You think the comparison is apt; you can practically see the horns on the Lady and her husband’s one fine shoe could easily hide a cloven hoof.

You did not think to blame them, then, though you suppose that you could now. You sit in the cellblock, serving your time after being held in contempt of court for refusing to answer the judges questions in English and all you can think is how you have failed. You abandoned Mituna to see Sollux and Aradia run to freedom while Mituna was shot. You abandoned your youngest siblings in order to cradle Mituna as he died while Sollux and Aradia were beaten into submission outside the warehouse his blood bought their escape from. Some protector you are. Some older sister.

Old. Yes, you are old. Young enough to sell, but too old for anything else. There are miles in your soul between here and California; you would need more than three languages to count them all.

 

 

Your father comes home with dark bruises sucked into the hollow point beneath his jaw. He’s turned his collar up, but it doesn’t reach high enough. She’s smarter than that. You know she left the bruises there on purpose so your mother could see them. Joke’s on her though; your mother won’t be home until late in the evening, after your father has already made dinner for the four of you and gone back to his cold side of the bed and you have left for work.

Your mother will come home as the morning light streaks the side of the house in pink and orange, smelling like the sex that He won’t let her wash off. The Lord English likes sending your mother home with his seed still drying on her, likes to imagine her taking the shower that always wakes your whole family up at half past five when the pipes groan at the water running through them. English likes to imagine your father wasting away in bed from apathy and hollowness, his body covered in the bruises his own wife left on his body like marks on a scorecard. English sends your mother home dirty in retaliation, letting her slink home like a soiled rag.

They're playing a game together, the two of them, Lord and Lady. Your parents are the chess pieces, your parents are the pawns. Points are scored in the calculus of scratches, bites. A new package of panties your mother needs to buy because English mixed hers into his wife’s. The suit your father keeps in the back of the closet for when the Lady will inevitably summon him for a social function to spite her husband. The Lady hates your mother for stealing the husband she doesn't love, so she uses your father to make little digs at her lord husband and his mistress both. The Lord hates his wife and thinks your father a joke, so he uses your mother to make them both miserable, not caring what happens to her in the aftermath. Meanwhile your home is empty,

Oh, yes, it’s a delicious little game they’re playing together, Lord and Lady. You want to set them all on fire.

You and your family are all collateral damage, nothing more or less than the tatters of people blowing in the wind, ready to be swept away after the ticker tape parade that came at the end of the war.

 

 

Sollux loses his lisp along with his teeth. The doctor says he must have had so many before that he couldn’t speak properly. “Maybe now he won’t swear so much,” he jokes, condescending, helpful smile plastered on his round pasty face. You want to bite off his lips and watch him choke on his own blood.

Next to him, Aradia is in her own bed, a ghost in the powder-blue, open-backed gown that they gave her, staring blankly at the wall. She has been staring since the warehouse. Her head is a mass of lumps and bruises. The white tape wound around her skull from where the doctors tried to treat her head injuries standing out against the darkness of her hair.

Aradia used to refuse to cut her hair before, taking pride in her hair even though it was too long to be practical with all the running around she did with the gang. Now, the doctors have cut it for her, claiming they needed it out of the way so that they could examine her head injuries better.

“I’m okay,” Aradia says slowly, her tongue visibly swollen in her mouth from where she had bitten it the night of the sting. Her voice is a placid monotone, all the joy she had not had to lose in Manzanar now leached away.

She opens her mouth again but no this time no words come out. You can see their shapes forming anyway; **仕方がない** – _‘it cannot be helped’_ and you almost throttle someone, hands itching at your sides.

You want to scream. You want to commit a murder. There’s a hypodermic needle on the tray next to you; the soft flesh of the doctor’s neck is stretched out nearby where he leans over you to inspect your only living brother. His nametag reads “Scratch;” you could rip it from his breast and use it to gouge out his eyes. The hard plastic would make him scream, you think, the dull edge scooping at the pale jelly in his pale face. You could kill him in a moment and you don’t even think you’d care what happened after.

You want blood, you want violence. You would think you’d had enough of violence but no, it seems that you have not. The pit inside you that has been since childhood was only knocked open by these latest cruelties of fate. It yawns, empty and dark, gaping like a mouth. It will devour everything and all you can think of is how badly you want to pitch the world in, to see it all go screaming into that dark night.

Around the doctor’s shoulder, Aradia catches your eye.

“I’m okay,” your sister says again, shaking her head slowly; “big sister, I’m okay, please, I am I am, I am okay-“

You do not murder the doctor. It is a very near thing. Later, you will wish that you had and will regret the missed opportunity for what it was.

 

 

If you cannot fill your soul with violence, then perhaps something else. You take the cue from your parents, as you do in so many things, the dutiful daughter to the last. You find that whoring is an easy task, once you understand it. Fuck, suck; look pretty and depraved. There is little subtlety to it, at least at first.

Your pimp is a woman; she calls herself Snowman, something you suppose is a pun on her skin or her shape. Snowman is elegant, dark and skinny as an unlit lamppost. By every right, she should not be here, should not look as lovely as she does. She knows it, too, and she uses that. Snowman is beautiful the way that the sea is beautiful. Still, lovely. Quick, violent, stirred by the storm and the force that wears down the cliff face, sending houses sliding into the sea. Snowman is the dark spaces beneath the water where deadlier things live; she is the squid that turns itself inside out and kills whales and eats sharks. Snowman is lovely like the sea, but ask any ship’s captain if he thinks the sea was harmless. Snowman is deadly like a rose.

Snowman does not care that you will not speak to her in English. She asks you only once to speak her language; after the cascade of profanity you unleash on her, she stops asking. To her credit though, she catches on very quickly that you can understand what she says to you. Faster still Snowman comes to realize that you can understand what is not said, as well.

From that point on, your clientele changes. You go from two-bit hustlers and unhappy husbands to political figures and businessmen, men of power who whisper things in the night to a whore who does not speak English. Afterwards, Snowman quizzes you on what they say; you respond only in Japanese, and very often only in dirty puns, though you make sure to always include the information she needs. You transmit your knowledge through pointed looks and tilting your brows; in this house of ill repute you have become a master of the language of the body. If you wanted to, you could cut off your ears and spend the rest of your life speaking without ever having to open your mouth, listening without having to hear.

Snowman smiles in her quiet, deadly way as you talk. The expression is mostly smirk, mostly approval. Snowman expects something from you, but then again a lot of people used to expect things of you. Still, the look is different on her. There’s more appraisal to it, something more proprietary than you’ve seen on others invested in your future. Recently, Snowman seems to be the only one who is convinced at all that you even have a future. Snowman looks at you like you have something more in you than your own blood and bones, and occasionally other people’s boners.

You’re not sure how you feel about that. No, that’s a lie, you know exactly how you feel. Snowman demands things from you and you want to give them to her, entirely out of a strange mixture of spite and respect. You want to prove her right. You want to prove her wrong. You want to burn the brothel down around both your ears and use the ashes to take over the world.

Snowman is not what you supposed a pimp would be like. She is elegant and refined. She is also deeply bloodthirsty, but perhaps you had expected that last. Someone puts a hand on her without paying only once; within the span of a second after the man puts his fingers on her thigh, Snowman’s long cigarette holder is jammed deeply into his eye.

The next week, that man and his three friends are the staff at her brothel. The quiet one becomes an accountant, the giant the bouncer, the short one the lookout and the package runner. As for the man with the missing eye, he arrives with a gray patch over his and becomes Snowman’s lieutenant and her lover shortly thereafter. Fittingly, he negotiates the place for himself and his companions with sex. You can see the indignity he suffers for his actions burning beneath his skin, visible when he looks at Snowman.

Snowman smiles at you when you tilt your head, eyes twinkling at the unconcealed threat in your eyes as they drift between her and the man whose expression nearly matches yours. The only difference is, your rage is less pointed, more protective as opposed to the destruction etched as a promise into the lines on his face. You are not sure when you had gotten so proprietary. Regardless, should he touch Snowman again, he will lose more than an eye.

“The only thing men like them respect is power,” Snowman answers your unspoken question, cigarette smoke curling around the holder in her hand as it drifts towards the ceiling; “make sure as much as possible of it belongs to you. They only need enough to feel secure; the rest has to be yours or they’ll take everything you have.”

You roll your eyes and tell the bitch to go fuck a dog to sate her heat. Snowman laughs; you wonder when she learned Japanese, or if she’s just recognizing the tone of voice. Snowman is someone you think would be familiar with being cursed at.

“Baby girl,” she calls you, dark eyes shining from under the long brim of her antique hat; “that’s good, save that fire. Stoke it, keep it. There’s a flame in you and you can use it. You’re a devil and you’re not even in disguise. Keep your skin on; don’t let ‘em see your horns yet.”

Snowman gives you a pair of ornamental chopsticks to pin back your hair, holding the bun in place. The concept is strange to you, to put utensils in your hair, but Snowman assures you that it completes an effect, that it is more of what men will expect from their little Asian whore.

“Plus,” Snowman laughs, gesturing to her one-eyed man, her scowling shadow; “you can always use them to gouge someone’s eyes out if you don’t like them.”

 

 

You remember the camp, from when you were young. You remember the hunger of it. Your mother loved to cook, back when she had the time for it. She used to make gruel, oatmeal, rice; whatever was on hand and would take the longest. She loved standing over the pot; trying to find food for you and Mituna was always something of a joy for her where for the other parents in the camp it was a sorrowful hardship.

Your mother doesn’t cook anymore. When the Lord first hired her she used to cook breakfast before she would leave and would try to be home for dinner, but it was hard. English was hard. He still is, most of the time. It’s half the reasons why he pays your mother.

You refuse to call anything by a name other than its own. You are a whore; your parents are whores. Call the family trade what it is.

 

 

The first person you kill is tastelessly dressed. You remember that long after you forget the rest of the details to repetition.

Droog brings him around to the back where your lady keeps court, Boxcars already having roughed him up a bit. The idiot looks at you through eyes that are wet with tears, a face red with blood, black with forming bruises. His suit is bright green, so bright it practically hurts to look at. The effect clashes with his blue hat and his tie, which is covered in a tacky blue and white pattern of repeating numerical twos. His hands are tied behind his back; Droog has presented this man to you and to Snowman as a hog for the slaughter, as the swine that he is.

The man pleads with you around the teeth Boxcars has relieved him of; _‘I have a wife, a family-’_ You ignore him. If he had had a family, he would not have been here. If he loved his wife enough to plead for her truly on his deathbed, then he would not have been here, harassing the girls and flouting Snowman’s law.

The pig pleads with you and calls you ‘doll face,’ and you fumble about inside yourself, finding the inside of your chest to be curiously hollow. The best you can feel for this man is lingering disgust at the way that he begs. Nothing more, and certainly a million things less.

“Go on,” Snowman says languidly, eyes hooded by her lashes as they peek out from under her hat; “don’t make us wait.”

You reach inside for the fire and this time you find it, letting seep into your skin from the inside out. When you are at last ablaze, the fury of Mituna’s killing, the hatred of all Manzanar’s children and Aradia’s unspoken 仕方がない enough to make a funeral pyre, you raise your hand calmly to the back of your head and let down your hair.

You spin the chopstick once, twice, testing its feel in your hand. Then you plant a hand on the man’s face, your left thumb digging into the space just below his right eye socket, the rest of those fingers gripping his scalp. You plant a pointed heel on his chest for leverage and tilt him backwards from the torso and the neck alike. The pig looks at you with horror and all you can think are feelings and concepts not well described in words. The closest you can get are words like contentment, victory, justice, but those words ring hollow in your mental ear.

Mostly, you are _hungry_ , in ways you’d never thought you’d be again, the yawning cavern in your soul where something used to be screaming to be filled.

Snowman watches as you run your chopstick through the pig’s left eye socket. At her side Slick makes a comment about a dime store lobotomy. The pig beneath your heel screams, just for a moment, but quickly stops once you jog the stick a bit, the sound choking off into pained incomprehension. He gurgles a bit; then there is silence save for someone’s heavy breathing. After a moment, you realize that that person is you.

When you pull the chopsticks out, they slide free with a wet squelch after a moment of suction; there is a thin gray slime mixed in among the blood red. You examine the sight for a moment and contemplate licking the chopsticks for effect, but that is not what one does with chopsticks and it seems unsanitary besides, even to you who have put so many questionable things into your mouth. Instead, you replace the sticks in your hair, pinning the black strands back into the bun you had set before the assignment. Washing your hair is going to be interesting later, but you had not thought of wiping the sticks off until after you put them back in place.

“Good job, honey,” Snowman drawls behind you, her voice smoky-sweet in the brothel’s shitty “mood lighting.”

あなたのお尻が虎によってリーマ取りに行く。 You spit, and Snowman just laughs and laughs.

At your feet, there is a pig in a cheap green suit. A small pool of blood is starting to accumulate beneath his slackened face.

“He was one of English’s,” Snowman says offhandedly. Your interest is piqued like the drawing of a blade, narrowing to a point sharp enough to cut light itself.

“Would you like to help me with the rest?” Snowman asks you slowly, a practiced carelessness you can almost taste in her voice; “I’m going to take him down, he’s been in this town too long. I figured you’d have a particular interest in removing him from this picture and I could use the extra pair of hands.”

あまりに奥方 You insist; 私は私がそれを切ったら、夫のペニスで彼女をファックしたい。

Snowman nods, and smiles; “of course.”

Her smile is an open knife in a dark room; you find yourself smiling back. You lick your lips, trying to return some kind of moisture to your strangely dried mouth. Your promise tastes like ashes and smells of fire on the wind, you can smell the inferno burning just below the horizon.

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize for literally everything in this fic. I wasn't going to post it originally, and all of the Japanese was supposed to be in colored text, but I can't figure out the coding, so. This was also my first time writing real gore of any sort.
> 
> Part of a larger Greaserstuck AU that [rainbowodyssey](http://rainbowodyessy.tumblr.com) created. She was kind enough to let me play in her sandbox, and I accidentally took the single sad she gave me (Mituna's death) and turned it into a million sads. There's a plot here that goes on much longer, but I have no time or real inclination to write it out.
> 
> The Japanese was done on google translate in true Damara fashion. As such, it's probably hilariously wrong. What it was supposed to be is as follows (according to the first run through from google)  
> \- あなたのお尻が虎によってリーマ取りに行く。 _Go get your ass reamed by a tiger._  
>  \- あまりに奥方 _The lady too_  
>  \- 私は私がそれを切ったら、夫のペニスで彼女をファックしたい。 _I want to fuck her with her husband's dick after I cut it off._
> 
> The phrase that Aradia and Mituna used has historical significance in terms of things said in Japanese interment camps. It means, roughly, "it cannot be helped," or "nothing can be done about it."


End file.
